„Kinder sind im Moment nicht in Ordnung“: Konservative fragen gemeinsam mit Liberalen, ob soziale Medien für Kinder verboten werden sollten
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/kids-arent-ok-right-now-conservatives-join-liberals-in-asking-whether-social-media-should-be-banned-for-kids
21 Kommentare
I think it should be banned but I have zero idea on how to do it without it becoming a privacy nightmare and I have zero faith in government not to screw it up
It should be banned but, I don’t see how it can be done without huge privacy issues for everyone else.
We have already shown we don’t have the guts to hold corporates accountable for much so that just leaves intrusive ID verification.
It needs to be done, for SURE…
The real question is how, without violating privacy and having far too much government interference.
People are acting like know your customer (KYC) laws don’t already exist in other sectors. Even crypt0 exchanges in Canada have KYC laws. Grandfather in old accounts, KYC new accounts set age limits to 16+. The rest of us are fine, they can mass delete any accounts under 16, and they can recreate their accounts at 16. Can make it fun societal thing at 16 like getting your driver’s license.
This whole banning kids from the internet is an admission from government that social media is a blight on society, alongside a total surrender to those who profit from that blight. We could just regulate it and ensure the internet is safe for all to use, but that would hurt the bottom line.
It brings me some real hope that reaction to this from Canadians seems to be “we don’t disagree but know you’re just trying to erode our privacy, not fix anything.”
Maybe they won’t ram a U.K.-style panopticon down our throats after all.
„Social media is poison for children“ is such a self-evident truth that Pierre Poilievre hasn’t even automatically disagreed with the Liberals about it.
That sounds like I’m mocking Pierre – and I kind of am – but seriously, when even he might collaborate with the Liberals on this issue, it tells you how serious the problem actually is.
Canadians should keep messaging their elected officials and Cabinet ministers, with explicit messages to reject any bans that require age verification and age assurance.
Yes 1000x yes. While were at it porn websites shouldn’t be assessable by just a “are you 18 yes or no” question you could easily lie on
People are worried about privacy if social media required ID verification? Your account is under your full legal name. You post 12 selfies a day. The city you live in is listed in your bio.
Don’t give me this shit about caring about privacy.
We should go past that and hold social media platforms accountable for all the content they allow to be posted.
If theyre facilitating the spread of unambiguous lies and misinformation which contributes to any law breaking, the platforms should have a share of responsibility.
While I agree that social media use by children is a major problem and we need to mitigate that damage.
Let’s be real here, there is no technical way to keep them off without implementing full age and ID checks.
I have no faith that a system can be built to do that without creating the biggest and sweetest target for identity theft… If an attacker wants in, they will find a way in.
And if they were to build that system they won’t stop at kids and social media.
Anything beyond a simple age gate involves communication of identifiable information, which can potentially be compromised and misused. [It already has been (compromised) in some cases.](https://securityboulevard.com/2026/02/age-verification-vendor-persona-left-frontend-exposed/) I expect more of that going forward.
This has been the issue that every programmer and their software engineering mother has been running into when it comes to implementing real solutions.
Right now, [there’s movement out of California](https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB1043/id/3269704) to enable an age gate on OS installs that would allow some kind of Parental Control to be more easily implemented by applications and websites.
Done with a simple „are you adult y/n?“ age gate, it would be easy enough to bypass by kids installing operating systems without their parents‘ involvement, but just reading that over you can imagine that it would likely deter a majority of them from getting around parental controls on their home devices.
I’m always amused at how much of an absolutely unquestioned fact it is that not only is social media harmful, it is significantly harmful and requires this level of intervention to stop. This seems to be one of those topics here that you can say whatever outrageous uncited thing you want because we all have this vague common-sense feeling. „Of course it’s damaging, how could it not be. TikTok is literal brain rot“. There’s a comment here doing the same thing to pornography, how it literally causes brain damage, I wonder if that will get the same unquestioned acceptance. I feel like that’s the sort of comment that maybe makes you step back and ask, wait really? How and to what degree? If you spend even a little time looking at studies, they are not filled the absolute certainly you see politicians espouse. Correctly, they hedge their conclusions, they say things like
>[There is broad agreement among the scientific community that social media has the potential to both benefit and harm children and adolescents.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK594763/)
Or reference specific thresholds
>[In a study focusing on 12- to 15-year-olds in the United States, spending three hours a day using social media was linked to a higher risk of mental health concerns.](https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/tween-and-teen-health/in-depth/teens-and-social-media-use/art-20474437)
This seems a large intervention considering the still relatively insignificant findings. The most dramatic conclusions come from extensive use, something that could be curtailed without an id system. Moreover, it really contrasts to how we treat kids otherwise. There are a lot of harmful things we tacitly allow because the inconvenience of the intervention is significant enough. We took down speed enforcement, something that is usually concentrated around schools, for example. We won’t enforce speeding limits for kid safety, something we can demonstrate will save lives, but we’ll end online privacy to protect the mental well being of children until the second they hit 18.
After that they can deal with an unaffordable housing market, a desperate job market and a rampant gambling market. This is all so deeply cynical, especially on behalf of the Conservatives who are explicitly onboard because it aligns with their anti-pornography stance.
I know we can focus on different things, but surely you can see the absurdity with all the very real challenges that young Canadians will face, that focusing on this issue and it getting any real attention is an absolute farce.
No one ever asks the kids of course, and that’s not unreasonable, we get to have a bit of a paternalist attitude to those we consider unable to look after their own best interests, but if we did ask the kids what they thought were the biggest dangers to their mental well being, I wonder what they’d say.
Here’s a fun figure,
>Child poverty rates have increased sharply; 15.6% of children aged 0-17 (over 1.1 million children across Canada) live in low-income households – up from 13.5% in 2020, according to the most recent data from the Census Family Low Income Measure, After Tax.
>Approximately 1.8 million children under the age of 18 were affected by food insecurity in 2022, a marked increase from the [1.4 million in 2021.](https://childrenfirstcanada.org/press-releases/new-report-reveals-top-10-threats-to-kids-in-canada-including-29-increase-in-food-insecurity/)
I wonder if poverty, and/or food insecurity, is a bigger danger to mental well being than social media use.
Here’s some more fun figures and the perpetual elephant in the room.
>Half of Canadian youth (48%) aged 16-25 expressed feeling high levels of anxiety about air pollution and climate change, while three-quarters (73%) expressed fear for their future.
>In the summer of 2023 alone, there have been multiple reports of child deaths due to extreme weather and pollution associated with climate change, and thousands of children have been displaced or had their daily activities disrupted due to wildfires and poor air quality.
>An estimated 15,300 Canadians die prematurely each year due to exposure to air pollution.
A carbon tax? Never, we won’t even enact work from home policies. I’m not sure it’s possible for me to express the amount of contempt I have for these initiatives. There is missing the forest for the trees and then there is whatever the heck this is.
I should add a pithy ending, This kid’s aren’t okay and we’re not going to do anything that might help.
As much as this hurts my sensibility of liberty and freedom, as a parent I could care less if social media was banned entirely. Net good in my opinion. I know the government won’t do the right thing and police the companies. So this is the next best thing.
Education about how the internet works is missing in both school and home. It should be treated with the same seriousness as sex education.
Banning something only makes it more attractive to want.
Adults aren’t okay right now, just look at who has the nuclear weapons codes, and is a convictioned felon.
After his funeral, adults and kids alike will be okay.
The things that make social media toxic and dangerous for minors are the same things that make social media toxic and dangerous for adults. How about we talk about regulating social media companies‘ toxic and dangerous business practices instead of just protecting minors?
I’d love to see this moral fervor about something that should be simpler to stop, like vaping in school buildings. Kids would rather rupture than use a high school washroom because it’s the domain of vapers, and teachers are apparently unable to do anything about it. Vape shops cluster around schools and are one step below pawn shops or payday loan stores in influence; that despite nicotine or cannibis vapes being 19+, and others being outright illegal. Clear physical health risks with much better evidence, and adult perps we could just arrest. Yet, we focus on the phones.
Selective moral upsets, and of a particular kind federal liberal backbenchers seems to specialize in. I think of it as „Corporate HR department woke“. It’s not left wing, and it’s not small-c conservative. It’s a weird sort of cultural policing of the moral obsessions of upper class people.
Don’t ban it for kids, ban it all together. If its harmful for kids, its harmful for adults. So why make the distinction? Its like the tobacco money. We know its bad, but the money is too good so we just make asinine laws that don’t actually solve anything.
it should be illegal to make recommendations based on opaque algorithms or to editorialize algorithmically
I’m still not quite sure how to word it into a law but I think it’s a workable premise
companies must be transparent *why* stuff appears in your feed
I imagine the younger folk don’t even remember how it used to be on the Internet in the 90s and 2000s. Yes there was manipulation of the signal and spam but mostly, the sequence of posts you saw, was the same sequence where people had clicked submit. The next thing you saw was a link which had been recommended by a person in an article you had read. Search results were returned and sequenced based on frequency count of search term, date of creation, etc. (Google used to tell you exactly how many times a specific word appeared in their search database.)
I remember when it was both a bit startling, and divisive, when Youtube started to auto-play a „randomly“ selected different video after the intentionally-selected video finished. We never quite processed what a transformation that is, handing immense editorialization power to the designer of the selection algorithm.
Corporations operate as individuals under most laws. You know what’s easier than controlling millions of children? Controlling half a dozen children. I am all for heavy and disgusting regulations for these companies for their immoral and unethical actions thet have done to society.